Yesterday it was my wedding anniversary, completing 11 years of togetherness with Anu. These 11 years have been a great journey together and Anu and me have lived some wonderful moments together. In these 11 years we have not only travelled extensively in India, even abroad.
Keeping the trend alive of travelling and spending time together, I decided to take two days off and all of us went to a nearby resort. With our 7 year old and 1.5 months old sons we decided to spend one night somewhere nearby. Since the younger one, whom we have named Reyansh (the elder one is Rishit) is quite young, we were not too keen to go far off and I decided to stay near Delhi.
So, we decided to stay in a property called The Gateway Hotel by Taj Hotels at Damdama, Gurgaon. This is a 4 to 5 start property that is not too old and is roughly 40 kms from our house and around 15 kms from Gurgaon.
I booked a Deluxe Room that had a private sit-out area, the idea was we sit in the morning outside the room with a view of the lush green garden with birds chirping and enjoying our early morning cups of tea. The property’s review was also good and considering all good, I booked it.
We checked in on 10th May at around 3PM and within few minutes of check in process were taken to our lavish room. The next two days in that property was a great experience with all four of us spending quality time with each other, clicking loads of selfies, spending time at the swimming pool, Rishit doing quad-biking, the three of us did biking and I also tried my hands driving a golf cart around the property. All in all, very good relaxation and great fun.
The idea of writing this article is not to glorify this hotel or tell you about my personal life. I obviously enjoy sharing my personal moments with my blog with my readers here, but this article is not about blabbering about myself. Rather, the reason behind writing this article came from a discussion I had with Anu when we were sitting outside our room, early morning.
While enjoying our cup of tea, Anu and me were discussing our 11 years of journey and some find moments we have spent together. We were discussing the places we have visited, the money invested in buying the house where we live and the money we spend on our children so they lead a good quality life. All this is possible because of the good wishes of our parents and friends, but it is also a result of the efforts we have made in the professional life to make a mark for ourselves.
I was narrating Anu that my mother always used to tell me – “Sirf teen saal padh le aur uske baad saari umar aish karega”. What this meant was that work extremely hard for the three years of your CA during articleship and you will enjoy for the rest of your life. And honestly, I took that statement very seriously in my life and believe me, it has proved right in all respects.
I was telling Anu about my articleship days, when we used to work late nights till 11PM and a lot of times even later. I was telling her how we used to miss all our coaching classes and studied using the notes of our friends who were lucky enough to get time to attend the classes. I was telling him how I was out of Delhi for audits almost 2-3 months in a year and during those outstation audits, we used to work crazy hours.
At times my office colleagues and me definitely had thoughts of changing the firm and taking dummy articleship, we definitely had thoughts of doing something that would give us more time to study. The levels of desperation were quite high knowing our other friends who were doing articleship from small-to-mid sized companies were getting enough, rather more than enough time to study and we were nowhere near them for completion of the course before the examination leave.
I told Anu in retrospect if I look back and one thing that I would not want to be removed from my life was definitely that grueling three-year schedule I followed in articleship. Though, as students we used to crib about it, but actually those three years taught me a lot. I learnt how to manage work, how to manage people’s expectations, how to stay determined in my behavior and most importantly, how to manage time. If I had not managed my time properly and wasted it, I probably couldn’t have stayed in a Taj property or enjoyed the lifestyle that I am experiencing now.
I come from an average background and the only reason why I became successful in profession (whatever limited success I have achieved), is only because of grit and hard work. At the back of my mind I always believed that I could do it, and do it successfully. Never in my mind I thought of failure and always believed in success. I had no godfather in my professional career, no mentor to guide me, but what I had was a belief that I would do it.
The reason I am telling you this story is because all of us are born genius and deserve a wonderful lifestyle to live. All of us deserve to stay in the best of the hotels, earn good salaries and enjoy a lifestyle not many could achieve. But this is not possible just by thinking, one has to do it to achieve it.
If we look at all top performers, whether industrialists or athletes or journalists, they all have one thing in common – Sheer determination to make it happen. I have in my previous articles talked about 10,000 hours theory of Malcolm Gladwell that talks about anyone getting to a genius level in any craft or sports provided he/she spends 10,0000 hours practicing it.
To reach a level where you say to yourself that I am now successful, you have to work really hard, you have to sacrifice lot of pleasures and undergo pains, you have to ignore others’ interests and focus only on your goals and finally you have to finish the tasks that have been started by you but still not finished.
In one of my previous articles titled – “Just Finish Whatever you Start” I mentioned about finishing tasks to achieve greater levels of success. The reason why majority people are unable to achieve greatness is not because they are dumb or not intelligent, but they are just slightly more focused than those who are not so successful.
YOU definitely deserve the best of the things in life, including money, power and comforts and it is not at all difficult. As the saying goes “If you want to be successful, just follow the successful people and you shall surely taste the success”.
- Get away from the distraction kitty. Stop doing things that add no value to your life;
- Have a clear focus and let anyone not deviate it from you;
- Stop procrastinating;
- Finish all the items started by you but still not complete;
- Meet only those people who fuel you with energy and optimism and help you reach your goals;
Make it a point to finish whatever you are doing, and finish it fast. Don’t waste time thinking about too many things. Focus on few things and complete them.
“If you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful”
There is no greater joy in life when you are able to afford the luxuries of the world, when people start to recognize you, when people say that this man has achieved a lot in his life, when you are able to buy nice cars and earn lot of professional respect. All this is quite easily achievable, you just have to think about it.
With these words, our younger son got up and Anu had to go inside the room to take care of him…
Authored by Nimish Goel (www.nimishgoel.com), a qualified chartered accountant who’s passion is to coach young chartered accountants and aspiring students achieve the best in their life. Nimish used to work with EY and PwC in India and has also worked with KPMG in Europe. He now runs his own consulting company and runs a blog www.nimishgoel.com.
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